Abpfiff - Deutscher Frauenrat

10
Every signature counts
From 8 March to 31 October 2006, around 180,000
signatures were collected in support of the
campaign‘s urgent policy recommendations –
including around 100,000 from Catholic women‘s
organisations. The latter group shared the campaign‘s
concern, but did not support the following statement
from the introduction to the policy recommendations:
“Existing rights for prostitutes need to be expanded
in order to improve working conditions, to ensure
that services are voluntary and independent, and to
combat social stigma. We have to make sure that
the human rights of prostitutes are upheld, and that
prostitutes themselves are treated with respect by
society at large and by their clients in particular.“
The Catholic women‘s organisations prepared
their own flyers excluding this statement, but
including all of the policy recommendations.
Wherever activists campaigned, they received
primarily positive responses from men as well as
women. Defensive reactions or vulgar remarks
were rare exceptions. It was clear that many people,
including visitors from other countries, had already
heard about the campaign from the media.
On 16 January 2007, the signatures will be presented
to the Office of the President of the German
Parliament; here they are accepted by Susanne
Kastner, Vice President of the German Parliament.
Human trafficking
Human trafficking is a serious crime whose
victims number around 2.4 million women,
men and children worldwide every year, as
estimated by a study published in 2005 by the
International Labour Organization (ILO).* Human
trafficking brings estimated annual profits
of around 32 billion US dollars. It accounts for
a significant share of organised crime, and is
usually linked with other serious violations.
In Palermo in 2000, the UN adopted the “Protocol to
prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons,
especially women and children“, known as the
“Palermo Protocol“ for short. Human trafficking
has since had a standard international definition,
namely the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the
threat or use of force or other coercion, of abduction,
fraud, or deception, for the purpose of exploitation.
In Germany, a new law passed in 2005 assigned
human trafficking to violations of personal liberty. The
definition of human trafficking in the German Penal
Code was modified and made more comprehensive
in accordance with international guidelines: §232
defines “human trafficking for the purpose of sexual
exploitation“, and §233 defines “human trafficking
for the purpose of labour exploitation“. Basic cases of
human trafficking are punishable by prison sentences
of six months to ten years, and aggravated cases (e.g.
involving children, serious physical abuse, civil or
criminal racketeering, force, credible threat of injury,
or deception) by sentences of one to ten years. Due
to the criminal nature of human trafficking, it is the
duty and obligation of the state (in particular the
police and prosecutors‘ offices) to investigate human
trafficking crimes and to prosecute the perpetrators.
* ILO: A global alliance against forced labour, Geneva 2005